"If the offer's still open," said the lieutenant, "we accept."
Delaney threw open a closet door and took out a brown leather valise. He grabbed several shirts out of the closet and stuffed them down into the bottom. "All right," be said. setting the valise on the table and carefully cutting the Lilliputians' bonds. "Get inside. But if you try anything, so help me, I'll do the Mexican hat dance on this bag. Let's go."
For a moment, Andre was too stunned to move. First Lucas had miraculously come back from the dead, and now Reese Hunter. But then she realised that this man couldn't possibly be the Reese Hunter she had known, the one who had been brutally murdered by the Timekeepers in 17th century France. This could only be his twin from the parallel universe, an officer in the Counter Insurgency Section — their counterpart to the Temporal Intelligence Agency.
They had met when Forrester had sent them on a mission through a confluence, into the parallel universe, where Nikolai Drakov had pretended to defect only so that he could hijack the S.O.G. 's Project infiltrator along with its brilliant director, Dr. Moreau. It was from Moreau that Drakov had learned how to create his deadly hominoids. Capt. Reese Hunter_ had been sent out to stop him and he had met the
Time Commandos when they were all taken prisoner by Drakov and his homicidal henchman, Santos Benedetto.
They didn't really know each other, and yet, in another sense, they did. This Reese Hunter was not the same man who had helped Andre to avenge her brother's death, but he was identical to that Reese Hunter in almost all respects, as if they had been cut from the same mould. He, in turn, had also known an Andre, although the
Andre he had known in his own universe had been killed while on a mission, just as the Lucas Priest and the Finn Delaney he had known had died. During the time they had shared the same prison cell at Drakov's headquarters on the island of
Rhodes, they had discovered that they "knew" each other well through having known their counterparts. It was an eerie sort of intimacy.
When they had escaped, they had taken Hunter prisoner. There had been no choice, of course. He was the enemy. But once they had crossed over back into their own timeline, Hunter had escaped with a stolen warp disc and they hadn't seen him since. Now there he was, lying on the floor at Andre's feet. badly bruised and battered. He was from the other side, but at the same time, he was indistinguishable from the man who had helped her and changed her entire life. They were the same, right down to their
DNA. As he raised his face to look at her, Andre could not suppress a gasp. And then, involuntarily, she moaned softly.
"Oh, Reese! What have they done to you?"
He squinted up at her through swollen eyelids. "Andre? Is that really you?"
Drakov chuckled. "It's rather like old home week, isn't it?" he said. "It really is amazing how fate keeps throwing all of us together. The late Professor Mensinger doubtless had an equation of some sort to account for how the Fate Factor keeps selecting us out of random temporal zones and manoeuvring us together to resolve our mutually disruptive influence. Well, perhaps this time we can settle things, once and for all."
Andre looked up at him from where she knelt on the floor, beside Hunter. "Drakov, how can you possibly be alive? I saw Forrester kill you!"
"Did you, indeed?" he replied, in an amused tone. "Somehow I've always thought that it would happen the other way around. I trust I died well?"
For a moment, she wondered if Drakov had somehow cheated death like Lucas had. With Nikolai Drakov, it seemed that almost anything was possible. His birth had been a temporal anomaly. He had been conceived when a very young Moses
Forrester, fresh out of boot camp and on his first assignment — in minus time, had been seriously injured and separated from his unit. He had been nursed back to health by a beautiful young Russian gypsy girl named Vanna Drakova. Stranded, crippled and with a damaged implant, young For-rester had thought that he was trapped forever in the past. By the time an S amp; R team finally found him, Vanna was pregnant with his child. Forrester, afraid that Yanna's child would be aborted, never mentioned it and the Search and Retrieve team took him away into the future, never to see the girl he loved again.
Nikolai was born in the middle of a brutal Russian winter storm while Moscow burned during Napoleon's retreat. He had survived when most other infants would have died in such severe conditions. His seemingly miraculous survival and his unusual health were due to the antiagathic drugs that were still active in his father's system, Forrester having received the anti-aging and immunising treatments shortly following his induction into the Temporal Corps.
From what little the uneducated gypsy girl could tell him about his father, Nikolai had formed a picture of some supernatural, demon lover who had abandoned both of them.
For years, he felt that he was cursed, a demon issue, and when his mother was murdered by a knife-wielding rapist who had given Nikolai the scar upon the left side of his face, the bitter, resentment and the fear had turned to savage hatred.
Years later, when he had found out the truth about his father from a woman known as Falcon, the infamous leader of the Timekeepers, Drakov had vowed that he would never rest until Moses Forrester was dead and the timestream was irreparably split. He was, of course, insane. And he was also dead. Andre had seen him incinerated by a plasma blast. So how could he possibly still be alive? And then the only possible explanation struck her.
“My God, you've done it to yourself," she said. "You've created a hominoid from your own genetic template!"
"Very good, Miss Cross," said Drakov, with an appreciative nod. "Very good, indeed. Only that should be hominoids, plural, not singular."
She paled. "How many?"
He smiled. "'Ah, now that would be telling, wouldn't it?
And what's life without a little mystery?"
She stared at him, astounded. "Does.. does that mean that you.. that you're…"
"That I'm what?" said Drakov, smiling. "The original Nikolai Drakov or a hominoid? Interesting question. You see, under normal circumstances, a clone would essentially be a sort of carbon copy, yet not necessarily the same as the original. Such things as culture, environment, experience and so forth play an important part in the formation of a personality. It's not merely a matter of genetics.
However, a hominoid is considerably more than just a clone. There is genetic manipulation and cybernetic surgery, among other esoteric procedures. And when you add time travel child rearing into the equation, what I call 'time lapse maturation,' carefully supervising the development through the years and using implant education to program specific memory engrams, why, then what you might very well wind up with would be a clone who has the same experiences, the same memories, and the same exact personality, carefully cultivated from identical genetic stock. And in such a case, how could you tell the difference? If I were the original Nikolai Drakov, I would naturally know that I was the original. Yet on the other hand, if I were not the original Nikolai Drakov, but I had been given the same memories and personality, how could I ever know?"
"So what are you saying?" said Andre. "That what Forrester killed was a hominoid?"
"Perhaps," said Drakov, smiling slightly, enjoying her confusion. "And perhaps not. Suffice it to say that he killed a Nikolai Drakov. But, as you can see, there are more where that one came from. "
"Dear Lord, I understand absolutely none of this," said Gulliver, miserably. "It seems that I have come full circle somehow. Will this madness never cease?"
"Never fear, Mr. Gulliver," said Drakov. "For you, it will cease all too soon.
You've really become quite an inconvenience. You seem to live a charmed life. I've never met a man who was more inept, yet so difficult to kill. It defies all explanation. "